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When all else fails, Continuity Remainers invoke the NHS in their last-gasp attempt to win support for their “People’s Vote”

The past few years have seen an inexplicable surge in the release of implausible, cheaply-produced disaster movies, aided by the falling costs of CGI, with plots based on supersized or hybrid creatures doing battle with the unfortunate humans who encounter them.

One of the first such movies, Sharknado, premiered in 2013 and is now up to the sixth film in the franchise (The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time). The dubious low-budget aspiring cult classic has also spawned spin-offs such as Lavalantula, a gripping tale of fire-breathing spiders which take over Los Angeles. Indeed, in order to maintain viewer interest the premises and storylines have had to become more and more outrageous, such that most new movies in the genre now require more than one type of freakish hybrid monster pitted against another – see Sharktopus vs. Pterocuda, in which a half-shark / half-octopus fights a half-pterosaur / half-barracuda for ninety excruciating minutes.

And as is often the case, what screenwriters see in their florid imaginations is eventually reflected to some degree in the real world. Right now, for example, British politics can be best analogized to the climate disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which multiple large storm systems combine to create a deadly superstorm which plunges the world into a new ice age.

Another such storm, much more recently developed, is generated by the ongoing howls of indignant outrage from Continuity Remainers who lost the EU referendum in 2016, failed to engage in any introspection during the subsequent two years and who have now convinced themselves that they and the entire machinery of the British state were plucky and outmatched underdogs who lost against a dastardly Leave campaign with a complete monopoly on lies and misinformation. To their minds, Brexit is an evil con perpetrated by Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Russians, and while the issue of Britain’s EU membership should never have been put to a public vote in the first place, now that the people have foolishly voted to leave the EU we must immediately hold another “People’s Vote”, and another one after that if necessary, until the current result is overturned.

Two political storms, both alike in stupidity. And now, as in a bad sci-fi movie, these two storms have collided and given us a superstorm – something new but equally tedious to watch:

Just as every general election since the 1950s has been billed as our last chance to save the NHS, now we are being told that thwarting Brexit and keeping Britain in the EU is the only way that a benighted country like the United Kingdom can possibly continue to provide healthcare free at the point of delivery.

Why? Because some opportunistic souls working for the Astroturf, Not At All Funded By Foreign Billionaires group People’s Vote realized that there were few more effective ways to rally hordes of whinnying, metro-leftist, public sector voters to their banner than by merging their own pet issue with the seventy-year campaign to Save Our NHS.

This is the new B-movie of British politics. Call it Sharktopus, call it Pteracuda, call it the Perfect Storm – what we have are two laughable, commercially dubious characters or phenomena forced together and foisted on the public in the grasping hope that the people will be too dim to see through the cynical political manipulation and buy into the resulting hackneyed storyline.

Watching Continuity Remain merge with Britain’s incessant Cult of the NHS is like witnessing two giant storm systems collide and combine to produce a Force 5 shark-spitting tornado of self-obsessed, teenage drama. This is disaster porn for crusty socialists and upper middle class EU cheerleaders who have yet to learn that a public which was not persuaded by hysterical worst-case scenarios during the 2016 referendum is not going to be effectively persuaded by an even cheaper, more ludicrous sequel two years later.

The ironic thing, though, is that these B-movie producers of British politics don’t see themselves as peddlers of low-budget tat; on the contrary, they think that they are highly skilled directors producing a critically acclaimed masterpiece. These are the folks who consider themselves the smartest people in the room, the people who think that their social position, academic credentials and professional accomplishments make them uniquely equipped – and entitled – to chart Britain’s political course. And the best that Britain’s top policy minds have come up with in response to Brexit is “let’s try shouting about the NHS at the same time we shout about the EU”. No introspection. No positive, compelling vision for Britain within the EU with which to convince swing voters. Just more worst-case scenario disaster peddling from the same overcredentialed mediocrities who still haven’t figured out why they lost the last round.

At this point, one can only laugh. If they were to have any hope of decisively seizing the public imagination and turning the tide against Brexit, Remainers needed to come up with a rich, compelling and superior new narrative. They needed to produce The Godfather, but instead they have given us Sharktopus.